What's hard is finding a customer who wants to be a guinea pig as we explore new avenues of outreach. When your user's phone buzzes, you capture their attention. By Jed Alpert, CEO, Mobile Commons Mobile marketing is still unexplored territory. It's only in the last few years that cell phones have become widely-adopted enough to create a truly pervasive mobile campaign. Because mobile messaging is so new, there aren't many rigorous best practices or established guidelines. MORE

What’s hard is finding a customer who wants to be a guinea pig as we explore new avenues of outreach. When your user’s phone buzzes, you capture their attention. Mobile marketing is still unexplored territory. It’s only in the last few years that cell phones have become widely-adopted enough to create a truly pervasive mobile campaign. Because mobile messaging is so new, there aren’t many rigorous best practices or established guidelines. MORE

Pay attention to your community. Organizations that joined Facebook early on endured the “price of early adoption”—they were the guinea pigs for a platform that was still figuring out just what to do with this form of user. My latest contribution to the Stanford Social Innovation Review is up on the opinion blog – you can read the post and join the conversation on the SSIR blog or read the full post below. MORE

Have a guinea pig user log in as a participant so you know what they are seeing and can work out any glitches. Pay particular attention to screen size, if the presenter's screen is very large, and participants' are small, the participants? A lot of organizations we work with are increasingly using web conferencing to have more productive meetings with staff in the field, share knowledge across projects and programs, and conduct training. MORE

The newest Big Vision podcast is up , and it is an interview with Ilyse Hogue, the Global Finance Campaign Director for the Rainforest Action Network and one of the founders of SmartMeme , a non-profit collective of long term organizers, strategists, trainers and communications professionals. MORE

If you think 5-8 participants won’t be enough for some stakeholders, show them one video clip of your testing where a participant says, “Um… I guess at this point I’d leave the website (without making a donation)” If that doesn’t get their attention, invite them to watch a round of testing personally. Note: This is the third in a series of posts about usability testing your website from guest author Brandon Granger, Senior Interaction Designer for Blackbaud. MORE

The winner will go on an international reporting trip with him to focus attention on the problems of global poverty, and its solutions. Possible destinations this year are Guinea-Bissau, Guinea, Liberia and/or Ghana. In today's Sunday New York Times article , Win a Trip You Won't Forget , two-time Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Nicholas Kristof , writes, "[I]f you want to save the world, you first must understand it." MORE

The Congress exposed some places and issues in severe need of attention, but I fear these are indignations quickly raised, quickly forgotten. They are places outside our daily lives--the Arctic, Papau New Guinea--and are easy, in some ways, to ignore or forget. What is the Science Center World Congress ? It's a question whose answer eluded me from the day I registered eight months ago through the first few days of the conference this week. MORE

Are you a busy developer who is working hard to put together and release a cutting-edge, modern, useful, or in-demand app that will capture the attention of users? The 3 Best App Testing Strategies for Busy Developers. Testing your app before launching is crucial. MORE